Echoing Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” long before it ever came out, Vanessa Williams’ hit single from 1992, “Save the Best for Last,” also explores the perspective of a woman waiting for her close male friend to come around and see that it’s she who has been the one all along. Amid his various breakups and complaints about relationships, it was so obvious, at least to Williams, that this man should be with her. Just as it was to Taylor as she insisted, “If you could see that I’m the one who understands you/Been here all along, so why can’t you see?/You belong with me/Standing by and waiting at your back door [a very innuendo-laden lyric]/All this time, how could you not know, baby?/You belong with me, you belong with me.”
Williams feels much the same, also addressing her friend/“love of her life” in the second verse in a similar fashion when she says, “All of the nights you came to me/When some silly girl had set you free/You wondered how you’d make it through/I wondered what was wrong with you/‘Cause how could you give your love to someone else?/And share your dreams with me/Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for/Is the one thing you can’t see.” While that sounds “innocent” enough in terms of the usual plotline about a girl who yearns to make the transition from platonic to romantic with her best male friend, as Williams continues the song, the nature of the relationship suddenly becomes less “fairy-tale” and more, well, kind of pathetic. No wonder so many singers rejected it, as a matter of fact. With the track eventually finding itself in Williams’ hands as, wouldn’t you know it, sloppy seconds because no one else was interested in keeping it around after being offered a turn with it.
Thus, when a song on her sophomore album, The Comfort Zone (what a title, considering “Save the Best for Last” is ultimately all about reverting to what’s “easiest”), needed to be replaced and the composition was presented as a substitute, Williams exclaimed, “I can’t believe nobody wants this song. I have to have this song.” And have it she did, managing to transform it into a number one hit and Grammy-nominated single. Which should give a strong indication of the cornball musical tastes that dominated the early 90s before jaded grunge took over for a brief blip in time.
While Williams (or rather, the “character” she’s portraying in sonic form) sits back and watches this man stick his dick in just about every other woman except her, she naturally starts to lose faith in the idea that they might ever be together. Or, more to the point, that he might ever be capable of seeing her sexually (call it the Keith Nelson/Watts effect before Dawson and Joey existed to eclipse that trope). But, lo and behold, “Just when I thought our chance had passed/You go and save the best for last.” Of course, if we’re being more candid about what’s really happening—in lieu of using Williams’ flowery description of events—the object of Williams’ affection has “resorted” to his female friend, sizing her up and all at once deciding, “Eh, I guess you’ll do. No one else has really worked out for me, so why not give it a go?” She is his last resort, his final attempt at seeing if this “love thing” is real, or if “enduring relationships” are just another myth propagated by previous generations in service of capitalism. Williams, meanwhile, is content to see his decision to be with her as a “belated revelation” on his part as she remarks a second time (for repetition is key to believing), “Sometimes the very thing you’re looking for/Is the one thing you can’t see.” In other words, sometimes you decide to see someone a certain way because it’s more convenient to do that than endure the effort of dating.
Even Williams appears to acknowledge that she’s a bit delusional in how she’s choosing to package this “once-in-a-lifetime” event, at least if the accompanying video is anything to go by. In it, she walks alone amidst a snow-covered landscape as snow also falls softly around her, so as to complement the line, “Sometimes the snow comes down in June” (once more, this is very Taylor Swift-y in tone—and not just because of “Snow on the Beach”), indicating how “special” and “unique” the phenomenon of her friend “realizing” they should be together is. She then passes an ax wedged into a stump, which is something of an odd visual choice that might lead the more “sick-minded” to believe this story could go in an entirely different direction: Williams is going to murder her friend-turned-lover for taking so long to come to his senses about her. That’s the extent of the production value before we see Williams alone in a cozy cabin with a fireplace (let’s not forget: the album was called The Comfort Zone) continuing to muse on how glad she is that things have finally progressed between her and her presumable “best friend.” And yet, if that’s the case, then where the fuck is he in all this? Is this, at heart, just an instance of erotomania being captured on film by the video’s director, Ralph Ziman? One could argue that for sure, or even that the ax shown at the beginning of the video alluded to how she murdered her friend so that she could finally project her emotions onto him and have them returned, propping him up somewhere in the house like Norman Bates’ mother.
Call it far-fetched, but it certainly makes sense considering her admission to years of what amounted to resentful longing in the lines, “‘Cause there was a time when all I did was wish/You’d tell me this was love,” adding, “It’s not the way I hoped or how I planned/But somehow it’s enough.” Damn, talk about the guy settling for second best, not “saving the best for last.” Here, too, the “let me murder and turn him into a ‘flesh doll’” plot definitely has clout, since she couldn’t seem to get him to “understand” that they ought to be together by any other means. Unless, of course, it is as straightforward as the song indicates and he arbitrarily glanced over at her one day and essentially said, “Eh, I guess you’ll do.”
She, in turn, marketed that to herself as a “grand love story” and automatically accepted the “proposal.” And this, somehow, was billed as one of the greatest love ballads of the 90s when, in truth, it’s pretty fucking depressing. A song that’s all about a man being desperate enough to “try” a woman he never would have were it not for his state of defeatedness in matters of love. Not to mention it’s a song that’s generic enough to have been used as the background for a British gravy commercial during the heyday of the single. To be more specific, a Bisto Best gravy granule commercial. Trying its hardest to sensualize the food shown before a disembodied hand starts pouring on the nasty gravy, you guessed it, last. Because, as the ballad teaches us, one should always save the “best” for last. The assumption on Williams’ part being that she and her friend-turned-lover will never separate. But that’s almost as naive as her believing that he “chose” her after all these years out of love rather than simply being out of ideas.
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